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Sunday, 29 June 2014

I am an avid John Lescroart fan, but was slightly disappointed
by The Keeper. Had I not read every
book in the Dismas Hardy series, perhaps I would have found this one more
compelling, but the excellence of the earlier novels puts this into the shade
by some considerable margin.

Two of my favourite characters, Dismas and Abe Glitsky, find
themselves on the same side of the law for once. Maybe that’s the issue – Abe working
for the defence just didn’t quite sit right for me.

As always with Lescroart, the plot looks simple on the
surface, but becomes more complicated and complex as the storyline progresses. The Keeper opens with Hardy and his wife
of many years discussing the disappearance of Katie Chase, a client Frannie
Hardy has been counselling for marital issues. The main suspect is, of course, the
husband, Hal Chase, a prison officer for the San Francisco county jail.

As more and more suspects (and dead bodies) turn up, The Keeper morphs into a police
procedural, rather than the courtroom dramas one would expect with Lescroart.

Politics rears its ugly head and the resolution of that
aspect left me feeling dissatisfied. All in all, not the best of Lescroart’s
work, but still far above the average crime/thriller out there.

Thursday, 26 June 2014

This week, in place of our usual interview, I am delighted to introduce a guest post from an award winning author, Marshall Stein. Marshall shares with us his reasons for writing his acclaimed crime novel, Rage Begets Murder.

One of the great pleasures of many classic
crime thrillers is the portrayal of the underbelly of a society. Raymond
Chandler in The Big Sleep exploring
the dark reality in the old money Sternwood family. John LeCarre revealing the
callous sacrifice of innocents in the The
Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Martin Cruz Smith etching in acid the
corruption of modern Russia in Gorky
Park.

Rage
Begets Murder takes place in Philadelphia during
the birth of the American Bandstand era. I was in high school during the 1950s
in a prosperous suburb of Philadelphia. It was a white Republican world. When I
registered to vote, it was a very short line for Democrats, and my registration
card was pink. There were few people of color in my high school. The first time
I remembered being in a social setting where whites and blacks were equally
visible was a jazz bar where Miles Davis performed that night.

Bandstand came to television during this
time. It was riveting: the music, the dancing. Teenagers could not wait to get
home and turn it on. Their contemporaries who danced on the show were so
wholesome in appearance: white, usually Italian or Irish American, mostly from
Catholic parochial schools. The only people of color on the show were the
singers, e.g. Little Richard Penniman, Fats Domino, etc.

The man who launched Bandstand, Bob Horn,
was accused by a dancer on the show of having a sexual relationship with her
from the time she was 13 until she was 15. At the time Horn was in his 40s,
married, with children. It was a huge scandal in the area known as the Delaware
Valley: portions of eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. I thought
this would be a good story for launching a novel.

I have chafed under the myth that everything
was perfect in the 1950s: that everyone prospered, that there was little crime,
that all races and religions lived in Happy Valley, in short, a world that
looked like a Disney cartoon. To the contrary, it was a world of deep racism; a
world where people lived in tribes of people like themselves; a world where Ivy
League universities set quotas for admitting minorities And a world where
violence erupted. This inspired me to write my debut novel in a form I loved, a
crime thriller, a genre where dark realities can be explored.

I brought to the book thirty-eight years of
trial and appellate experience. Early on, I was an Assistant United States Attorney
and then the Chief Staff Attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First
Circuit [Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island]. In government
service and in private practice I met people from all sides of the street. The
character of Chumsky in RBM, the businessman/organized crime kingpin, was
inspired by a real person, a man who died many years ago. Not surprisingly some
of the novel is set in a law firm.

RAGE BEGETS MURDER has been called “an
author’s tour-de-force” [Jeremiah Healy, Shamus award winner and Past President
of International Association of Crime Writers]. “Rage is a stunning example of
psychoanalytic character examination and superb story weaving on the part of a
very disciplined writer.” [Heater, a noir zine].

Last December I was one of 44 authors at
Mystery Night, a group that included Joseph Finder, William Landay, Linda
Barnes, Sarah Smith, Hank Phillipi Ryan and Hallie Ephron. I will be a panelist
at NoirCon in Philadelphia the end of October. Though retired from the practice
of law, I was among 25 lawyers who were invited for a private reception with U.S.
Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and Alito a few weeks ago.

In 2013 RBM was the #1 bestseller for my
publisher Post Mortem Press in bookstores, and PMP’s #5 on Amazon in the U.S. It
is now available on Amazon UK.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014

I was doing some research online the other day into how long
it would take a healthy teenager to starve to death (for a future D.I. Paolo
Storey novel, I hasten to add – no teenagers were harmed in the production of
this post).

While surfing the web on the subject, I was appalled at the
auto fill options that came up, showing the weird (and frightening) things
people search the internet for. I found myself praying that they were all, like
me, simply researching for a novel, or maybe for a thesis on crime.

I then had to find out how long it would take to starve the
same poor teenager if he had also been subjected to physical abuse. (I know,
I’m a horrible person!) The auto fill suggestions that came up for that
particular search will give me nightmares for weeks to come. There are some
seriously depraved minds out there!

But these searches made me stop and think about other things
I’ve needed to find out for my novels. If I had to put my computer in for
repairs, what would the repairman make of my web history?

I’ve researched child abuse and people trafficking, not to
mention the extensive searches I’ve done on how to kill people and get away
with it. My internet history reads like an encyclopaedia of depravity. I have
looked into building secret dungeons, what torture instruments are freely
available, how to kill with bare hands, what degree of torture people can
survive, and how to soundproof rooms.

What if the aforementioned repairman decided I was a menace
to society and reported me to the local police? I live in Spain. My Spanish is
coming along, but how on earth would I convince the officers of my innocence
when the only things I can say in Spanish and be certain of being understood
are: “Where is the nearest train station?” and “I would like to book a table
for two people for this evening.”

Deciding I should clean up my computer before being hauled
off to prison, I ran an online search to find a programme that would eradicate
all traces of my browsing history. Needless to say, I once again got
side-tracked by the auto fill options that came up. In no time at all, I was on
forums devoted to making sure the police couldn’t retrieve data that had been
wiped.

Did you know that, even after reformatting, the police have
wunderkinds who can reassemble your browsing history from the tiny, weeny,
itsy-bitsy fragments left behind? No, neither did I, but by the time I found
out, I was beyond fear of being unable to explain my actions in English, never
mind in Spanish, and had moved into full-blown paranoia. Not only did I have
the history of all those dreadful searches, but I had now added to my possible
crimes by showing that I had searched for ways to cover up the earlier online
activity.

In a panic, I called my daughter and explained to her my
concerns and what I intended to do to make sure I stayed out of a Spanish gaol.
“The best thing,” I said, “is to buy a new computer and keep this one just for
online searches. That way, when it breaks down, I can just take a hammer to it
and scatter the fragments in the local tip.”

I’d expected at the very least a murmur of approval for what
I thought was a brilliant plan, but only silence greeted my words. After a
short pause, I heard her laughing and then, ignoring me completely, she called
out to her partner, “You’ll never guess what my looney mother has come up with
this time!”

After she’d related my sad tale to Karl, she came back on
the line. “I’m so pleased you use a pen name,” she said. “I won’t have to tell
anyone the madwoman locked away in prison is anything to do with me. Don’t
worry, Mum, I’ll send you a cake with a file in it. I’m quite sure, with your
vivid imagination, you’ll find a way to break free.”

Hmm, good point. Turning to the computer, I typed: escaping from a Spanish prison